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Why ELO Hell does not exist and how to remedy ELO Purgatory

ELO Hell does not exist, but I'd like to propose a change to deal with it anyway.

Now hold up, before you start freaking out and derailing the thread with your rehashed asinine arguments, hear me out:

ELO Hell is commonly defined as a place where good players cannot carry themselves out of around 1000-1200 ELO because of bad players, leavers, trolls, etc. This is not the case. A good player will, in time, slowly carry him or herself out. It's more like an ELO Purgatory where you're stuck waiting around interminably rather than an inescapable Hell.

I am in what is considered ELO Hell, but slowly climbing out. I was bad when I started, but after a lot of practice, reading guides, and watching guys like Dyrus, Scarra, and Oddone stream, I've gotten a lot better, my ELO has gotten a lot better, and both my rating and I continue to improve.

When I say slowly, however, I mean slowly. Disgustingly slowly. For someone who only has one or two hours to play it might really seem impossible.

While sometimes you'll go on winning streaks and it will seem like there are a glut of decent players on their way up, most of the time you will end up playing four or five games just to go up 15 points in ELO, if you're lucky. It's five steps forward, four steps back. Sometimes the only way to avoid outright quitting is to remind yourself that at least you're on the way up, however long it takes, while the window-licking rager XxXD4Rk_Pr1Nc3_G0KUXxX is on his way down.

The reason for this is that fresh level 30's are dumped into the 1000-1200 elo range. In roughly every other game, you will encounter trolls, leaver(s), ragers, absolute children, and people who simply do not understand the very basics of play.

This is why the myth of elo hell exists. Competent players can claw their way out, but it takes a lot of strategic queue dodging, duo-queueing to hedge your bets, and the ability to play well above everyone else on either team. Chance weighs extremely heavily in having a game that isn't total trash and this is simply not fun.

So now that we've identified the problem, what's the remedy? Here are a few of my ideas:

-I think that an ELO loss for a game where your team has one or more permanent and early (~25 minutes or less) leavers should be halved for each leaver. While it is possible to carry a 4v5 (or even, rarely, a 3v5), this takes much more skill in terms of both game mechanics and morale management than your apparent ELO would suggest. This would still help in a situation where the other team has a leaver as well. Sometimes both teams will have leavers, making it a 4v4; this does not, however, mean that the game is on even terms. Some roles are more critical than others and some players are better than others. Having your baller ADC's Internet cut out because he's 12 years old and his mom needed to use the Internet to buy some wrinkle insurance or check on her Republican singles website or whatever sucks. It doesn't really suck too much less, however, when the other team's special ed AD karma support/roamer/initiator decides he's tired of playing for the day halfway through a match and goes to take a nap.

-Fresh 30's who are playing their probationary ranked games should be lumped together rather than dumped into mainstream ranked games. (edit: One poster pointed out that this may already be the case, however the number of games in this "new player island" may not be enough. When you lolking someone during champ select to see what you'll be working with and they have 30 ranked games, what goes through your head?)

-Those players new to ranked should start with ELOs in a range lower than 1000-1200. Why? Fresh 30's almost always sink like rocks when they start in the 1000 to 1200 ELO range, and fresh 30's love to get in on some of that ~mysterious ranked action~ that they've been denied for weeks while grinding out levels. In order to avoid just moving the range of "ELO Hell" down a few notches, however:

-These new players should be classed based on a sample size larger than five games. Why use a laughably small sample size of games to determine an individual's starting ELO, only to turn around and force competent players, or even good players, to fight through a geometrically larger sample size? The ranges of 0-1000 would provide a large amount of wiggle room to class these new players making it far less likely that a smart player who practiced for months in normals before playing a single ranked game would get shafted and stuck in the short bus range.

I haven't run the numbers, but I have experienced how people play at various ELOs. In my experience, people at 700-800 ELO mostly play better than people between 1000 and 1200 ELO.

There may be no ELO Hell, but the system is certainly horribly broken for those of us on our way up through what is considered ELO Hell. The game should be fun and competitive, and it ends up being neither of these things when you encounter people with less than 30 ranked games under their belt instalocking four melee carries, raging because you're giving gentle advice, or not level 2 tower diving with them, etc.

With a few simple changes to how fresh level 30's are handled I think the system could be reworked into something that's actually fun and competitive. Riot has consistently told us that their goal is to make the game fun, so why hold off on reworking the most grueling, grindy, unfun part of the game?

In the end, most of us don't care about some number. It's about having fun and improving our skill. The way ELO currently works gets in the way of that.

What do you guys think? Yes? No? Any other ideas? Do you think I'm right or wrong in that there is a problem regarding the ELO grind and how it gets in the way of having fun? Why or why not?

I actually disagree. When I first started playing ranked S1, it did not take long (<20 games) for me to sink consistently below my peak of 1250ish and soon after I hit 1000, and stopped playing ranked for a while.

Once I got good at a champ and came back, I quickly rose to 1250, right before S1 ended.

Then once S2 started, I won 11 of my first 13 Lee Sin games and something like 13 of my first 16 total games. I was probably a 1500ish player at that time.

I think I got semi-lucky, but not too lucky.

So I don't think it's a huge issue

edit: while everything can be improved upon...... all the easy options don't work for one reason or another. so IDK how they'd do it

edit: reread your post.
1. fresh 30s and fresh ranked are put together for their first 10 games or so, it's called noobie island, the 1200 you experience at the start of ranked is not the 1200 pool after 40 ranked games
2. do you really think extending the placement match period would fix things? I bet for every person who had unlucky games in their placement matches 5-10 and ended up lower than they should have, there would be someone who had unlucky placement matches in placements 15-20 if it were extended. Make sense? The placement matches aren't to separate a 1400 from a 1300 or a 1700 from a 1600. They're to move the 1400 or 1500+ crowd out of the 1200-1300 elo range ASAP (same with the low end of the spectrum)

edit: if you feel like you have to game things by strategically q dodging, etc, chances are you are actually not much better than your current elo. My advice? Find a champ you really like who you do well with and spam normals until you master them (you'll know when) and then when you come back to ranked it's smooth sailing.

edit: reread your post.
1. fresh 30s and fresh ranked are put together for their first 10 games or so, it's called noobie island, the 1200 you experience at the start of ranked is not the 1200 pool after 40 ranked games

OK, that's interesting. So I should basically start over with a fresh account if I want to keep playing at all.

Quote:

2. do you really think extending the placement match period would fix things?

Yes, and I don't think you understand what I'm saying. 5-10 games is not an adequate sample size by which to judge anything in this game. Nor are 15-20. Why rely on viable sample sizes at all when placement ignores them entirely?

Quote:

edit: if you feel like you have to game things by strategically q dodging, etc, chances are you are actually not much better than your current elo. My advice? Find a champ you really like who you do well with and spam normals until you master them (you'll know when) and then when you come back to ranked it's smooth sailing.

I think you lied and didn't actually read the OP. :3

I know I'm better than some of the people I'm playing with. I do very well in every phase of the game, but people constantly throw in the most idiotic ways imaginable. Like, constantly, and not just on my teams either. It works both ways. Like I said, I'm slowly crawling my way out. Sometimes it's the other team with the trolls/afks, sometimes it's mine, sometimes it's both, sometimes it's neither. The problem isn't that baww I'm in elo hell, it's that the grind to get out is god awful. I'm not vastly superior to most of the people around me, I still need a lot of improvement, but my ELO is steadily rising. I don't know what my "true" ELO is, I just know it's taking me a long time to get there. I'm not Dyrus, I can't carry like a plat or even a gold, and that's what it'd take to deal with the stupidity you encounter in 1000-1200 to rise quickly, ignoring luck.

I've played with players who are starkly better than me who experience the same. This isn't just me.

Let's look at it like this: Ignore my ELO. It's getting in the way of the discussion. It is just as likely that I am at my true elo each time I rise and plateau. Perhaps I was carrying myself like a godking baller, doing madly improbable dunks, and the games where my team doesn't know how to play are my fault, and I never noticed any of this somehow. I'm fine with that possibility. The fact remains, however, that playing at 1000-1200 is almost like smurfing at around level 20ish.The 700-900 bracket is actually more consistent in terms of player skill.

Like, I can't ever remember seeing so many people with less than 30 ranked games.

Hell, ignore ELO gain/loss in general. All I'm interested in is fun. Why is it that at this range people are so much worse? Dealing with these people is like trying to **** glass.

I think these are good ideas, but sadly I don't see them ever being implemented into the game.

Lowering the "dump" ELO for when new ranked players start is a good idea, but that doesn't really solve anything. Just moves it all to a different number. That would really only help out the people that are currently stuck around 1200.

Also, I do like the idea of "fresh" ranked players getting more predominately matched with other new players. The better players will still win and the worse players will still lose. And things will move as they should and people end up where they belong eventually.

I still don't quite understand exactly how ELO lost or gained for matches is calculated, but a lot of what's going on with the matchmaking system seems a bit broken. I do like the idea of somehow softening the blow when 1 of your teammates didn't connect for the first 10 minutes or one rage quits halfway in or something of the sort.